The Rise and Fall of Amiga Computer, Inc.
by Gary Oberbrunner (...!masscomp!garyo)
On Monday March 2, RJ Mical (=RJ=) spoke at the Boston Computer Society
meeting in Cambridge.
Fortunately I was momentarily possessed with an organizational passion,
and I took copious notes. I present them here filtered only through
my memory and my Ann Arbor. My comments are in [square brackets].
What follows is a neutron-star-condensed version of about three and one
half hours of completely uninterrupted discussion.
The Early Days
Amiga Computer Inc. had its beginnings, strangely enough, RJ began,
with the idea of three Florida doctors who had a spare $7 million to invest.
They thought of opening a department store franchise, but (as RJ said)
they wanted to try something a bit more exciting. So they decided to
start a computer company. "Yeah, that's it! A computer company!
That's the ticket! :-)"
They found Jay Miner, who was then at Atari (boo hiss) and Dave Morse,
the VP of sales (you can see their orientation right off..) they
lifted from Tonka Toys. The idea right from the start was to make the
most killer game box they could. That was it, and nothing more.
However Jay and the techies had other ideas. Fortunately they
concealed them well, so the upper management types still thought they
were just getting a great game machine. Of course the market for
machines like that was hot hot hot in 1982...
They got the name out of the thesaurus; they wanted to convey the
thought of friendliness, and Amiga was the first synonym in the list. The
fact that it came lexically before Apple didn't hurt any either, said RJ.
However before they could get a machine out the door, they wanted to
establish a "market presence" which would give them an established name
and some distribution channels - keep thinking "game machine" - which they
did by selling peripherals and software that they bought the rights to
from other vendors. Principal among these was the Joyboard, a sort of
joystick that you stand on, and you sway and wiggle your hips to control the
switches under the base. They had a ski game of course, and some
track & field type games that they sold with this Joyboard.
But one game the folks at Amiga Inc. thought up themselves was the Zen
Meditation game, where you sat on the Joyboard and tried to remain
perfectly motionless. This was perfect relaxation from product
development, as well as from the ski game. And in fact, this is where
the term Guru Meditation comes from; the only way to keep sane when
your machine crashes all the time is the ol' Joyboard. The execs
tried to get them to take out the Guru, but the early developers,
bless 'em, raised such a hue and cry they had to put it back in right away.
When RJ interviewed with Amiga Computer (he had been at Williams) in
July 1983, the retail price target for the Amiga was $400. Perfect
for a killer game machine. By the time he accepted three weeks later,
the target was up to $600 and rising fast. Partly this was due to the
bottom dropping completely out of the game market; the doctors and the
execs knew they had to have something more than just another game box
to survive. That's when the techies' foresight in designing in
everything from disk controllers to keyboard (yes, the original
original Amiga had NO KEYBOARD), ports, and disk drives began to pay off.
The exciting part of the Amiga's development, in a way its adolescence,
that magical time of loss of innocence and exposure to the beauties and
cruelties of the real world, began as plans were made to introduce it,
secretly of course, at the winter CES on January 4th, 1984(?).
Adolescence
The software was done ten days before the CES, and running fine on
the simulators. Unfortunately when the hardware was finally powered
up several days later, (surprise) it didn't match its simulations.
This hardware, of course, was still not in silicon. The custom chips
were in fact large breadboards, placed vertically around a central
core and wired together round the edges like a Cray. Each of the three
custom `chips' had one of these towers, each one a mass of wires.
According to RJ, the path leading up to the first Amiga breadboard, with
its roll-out antistatic flooring, the antistatic walls just wide enough
apart for one person to fit through and all the signs saying Ground Thyself,
made one think of nothing so much as an altar to some technology god.
After working feverishly right up to the opening minutes of the CES,
including most everybody working on Christmas, they had a working
Amiga, still in breadboard, at the show in the booth in a special
enclosed gray room, so they could give private demos. Unfortunately
if you rode up the exhibit-hall escalator and craned your neck, you could
see into the room from the top.
The Amiga was, RJ reminisced, the hardest he or most anyone there had
ever worked. "We worked with a great passion...my most cherished
memory is how much we cared about what we were doing. We had
something to prove . . . a real love for it. We created our own sense of
family out there."
After the first successful night of the CES, all the marketing guys got
dollar signs in their eyes because the Amiga made SUCH a splash even
though they were trying to keep it "secret."
And so they took out all the technical staff for Italian food, everyone got
drunk and then they wandered back to the exhibit hall to work some more on
demos, quick bug fixes, features that didn't work, and so on.
At CES everyone worked about 20 hours a day, when they weren't eating or
sleeping.
RJ and Dale Luck were known as the "dancing fools" around the office
because they'd play really loud music and dance around during compiles to
stay awake.
Late that night, in their drunken stupor, Dale and RJ put the finishing
touches on what would become the canonical Amiga demo, Boing.
At last the true story is told.
Money Problems
After the CES, Amiga Inc. was very nearly broke and heavily in debt.
It had cost quite a bit more than the original $7 million to bring the
Amiga even that far, and lots more time and money were needed to bring
it to the market. Unfortunately the doctors wanted out, and wouldn't
invest any more. So outside funding was needed, and quick.
The VP of Finance balanced things for a little while, and even though
they were $11 million in the hole they managed to pay off the
longest-standing debts and keep one step ahead of Chapter 11.
After much scrounging, they got enough money to take them to the June
CES; for that they had REAL WORKING SILICON. People kept peeking
under the skirts of the booth tables asking "Where's the REAL computer
generating these displays?"
Now money started flowing and interest was really being generated
in the media. And like most small companies, as soon as the money
came in the door it was spent. More people were added - hardware
folks to optimize and cost-reduce the design; software people to
finish the OS. Even the sudden influx of cash was only enough to keep
them out of bankruptcy, though; they were still broke and getting
broker all the time. How much WOULD have been enough? RJ said that
if he were starting over, he'd need about $49 million to take the
machine from design idea to market. Of course Amiga Inc. had nowhere
near that much, and they were feeling the crunch. Everybody tightened
their belts and persevered somehow. They actually were at one point
so broke they couldn't meet their payroll; Dave Morse, the VP of Sales,
took out a second mortgage on his house to help cover it, but it still
wasn't enough.
They knew they were going under, and unless they could find someone
quick to buy them out they were going to be looking for jobs very shortly.
They talked to Sony, to Apple, to Phillips and HP, Silicon Graphics
(who just wanted the chips) and even Sears. Finally...they called Atari.
(Boo! Hiss! [literally - the audience hissed at Jack Tramiel's name!])
Trying to be discreet, RJ's only personal comment on Jack Tramiel was
(and it took him a while to formulate this sentence) "an interesting
product of the capitalist system." Ahem. Apparently Tramiel has been
quoted as saying "Business is War." Tramiel had recently left
Commodore in a huff and bought Atari "undercover" so that by the time
he left C= he was already CEO of Atari.
Realizing that Commodore was coming out with their own hot game
machine, Tramiel figured he'd revenge himself on them for dumping him by
buying Amiga Inc. and driving C= down the tubes with "his" superior product.
So Atari gave them half a million just for negotiating for a month;
that money was gone in a day.
Of course Tramiel saw that Amiga Inc. wasn't in a very good bargaining
position; basically unless they were bought they were on the street.
So he offered them 98 cents a share; Dave Morse held out for $2.00. But
instead of bargaining in good faith, every time Morse and Amiga tried
to meet them halfway their bid went down!
"Okay, $1.50 a share.
No, we think we'll give you 80 cents.
How about $1.25?
70 cents."
And so on...
Even Dave Morse, the staunchest believer in the concept that was the Amiga,
the guiding light who made everyone's hair stand on end when he walked into
the room, was getting depressed. Gloom set in. Things looked grim.
Then, just three days before the month deadline was up, Commodore called.
Two days later they bought Amiga Inc. for $4.25 a share.
They offered them $4.00, but Dave Morse TURNED THEM DOWN saying it wasn't
acceptable to his employees; he was on the verge of walking out when they
offered $4.25. He signed right then and there.
The Commodore Years
Commodore gave them $27 million for development; they'd never seen
that much money in one place before. They went right out and bought a
Sun workstation for every software person, with Ethernet and disk
servers and everything. The excitement was back.
Commodore did many good things for the Amiga; not only did they
cost-reduce it without losing much functionality, they had this
concept of it as a business machine; this was a very different
attitude from what Amiga Inc. had been working with. Because of that
philosophy, they improved the keyboard [ha! - garyo] and made lots of
other little improvements that RJ didn't elaborate on.
What could Commodore have given them that they didn't? The one thing
RJ wanted most from them was an extra 18 months of development time.
Unfortunately Commodore wasn't exactly rich right then either, so they
had to bring out the product ASAP [and when is it ever any different?]
Also, he said, they could have MARKETED it. (applause!).
If he'd had that extra 18 months, he could have made Intuition a
device rather than a separate kind of thing; he could have released it
much more bug-free.
As far as marketing goes, the old ad agency has been fired; we should
see some new Amiga ads real soon now.
The Future
RJ's advice for A1000 owners: "Keep what you've got. It's not worth it
to trade up. The A1000 is really a better machine."
This may be sour grapes on RJ's part, since the Amiga 2000 was designed
in Braunschweig, West Germany, and the version of the A2000 being
worked on in Los Gatos was rejected in favor of the
Braunschweig-Commodore version. However the A1000 compares to the
A2000, though, the Los Gatos 2000 would have certainly been better
than either machine. C= management vetoed it because Braunschweig
promised a faster design turnaround (and, to their credit, were much
faster in execution than the Los Gatos group would have been) and more
cost-reduction, which was their specialty. Los Gatos, on the other
hand, wanted a dream machine with vastly expanded capabilities in
every facet of the machine. The cruel financial facts forced C= to go
with the Business Computer Group, who did the Sidecar in Braunschweig
as well, and quickly and cheaply.
So they fired more than half the staff at the original Los Gatos
facility, one by one. That trauma was to some extent played out on
the net; no doubt many of you remember it as a very difficult and
emotional time. There are now only six people left in Los Gatos, and
their lease expires in March, so thus expires the original Amiga group.
And that's how RJ ended his talk; the rise and fall of Amiga Computer Inc.
The future of the Amiga is now in the hands of Westchester and
Braunschweig, and who knows what direction it will take?
PART 2 - Technical Questions From the Audience
I'll just make this part a list of technical questions and answers, since
that was the format at the talk anyway. This part is part technical inquiries
and part total rumor mill; caveat emptor.
Q's are from the audience, A's are =RJ=.
Q: When is 1.3 coming and what's in it?
A: 1.3 (or maybe it'll be called 1.2A) will be mostly just 1.2 with hard disk
boot; it'll look for Workbench on dh0: as well as df0:.
No one is working on it right now, although there are people in W.Chester
planning it.
Q: Can you do double buffering with Intuition?
A: Pop answer: No. Thought-out: well, yes, but it's not easy. Use MenuVerify
and don't change the display while menus are up. It's pretty hairy.
Q: How big is intuition (source code)?
A: The listings (commented) are about a foot thick, 60 lpp, 1 inch margins.
Q: Where did MetaComCo come into the Amiga story?
A: MCC's AmigaDos was a backup plan; the original Los Gatos-written AmigaDos
was done with some co-developers who dropped out due to contract and money
hassles when C= bought Amiga. Then MCC had to crank EXTREMELY hard to
get their BCPL Dos into the system at the last possible minute.
Q: Why isn't the Sidecar out?
A: Who knows? It passed FCC in December...
Q: Why no MMU?
A: Several reasons. Obviously, cost was a factor. MMUs available at the
time the Amiga was designed also consumed system time [this is what he said-
I'm just the scribe]; although newer MMUs solve this problem they were too
late for the Amiga.
Second, the original goal of the Amiga was to be a killer game machine with
easy low-level access, and an MMU didn't seem necessary for a game machine.
Third [get this!] with an MMU, message-passing becomes MUCH MUCH
hairier and slower, since in the Amiga messages are passed by
just passing a pointer to someone else's memory. With protection, either
public memory would need to be done and system calls issued to allocate
it, etc., or the entire message would have to be passed. Yecch. So the
lack of MMU actually speeds up the basic operation of the Amiga several
fold.
Q: Why no resource tracking?
A: The original AmigaDos/Exec had resource tracking; it's a shame it died.
Q: How is your game coming? [??]
A: It's just now becoming a front-burner project. It's number crunch
intensive; hopefully it will even take over the PC part of the 2000
for extra crunch. It's half action, half strategy; the 'creation' part
is done, only the playing part needs to be written. Next question. :-)
Q: Will there ever be an advanced version of the chip set?
A: Well, Jay Miner isn't working on anything right now... [RUMOR ALERT]
The chip folks left in Los Gatos who are losing their lease in March
were at one time thinking about 1k square 2meg chip space 128-color
graphics, although still with 4 bit color DACs though...
and even stuff like a blitter per plane (!!)
They were supposed to be done now, in the original plans;
they chip designers will be gone in March, but the design may (?)
continue in Westchester. Maybe they'll be here two years from now.
Q: What will happen to the unused Los Gatos A2000 design?
A: ??????
Q: Should I upgrade from my 1000 to a 2000?
A: Probably not. The 2000 isn't enough better to justify the cost. Unless
you need the PC compatibility, RJ advocated staying with the 1000. After
all the 2000 doesn't have the nifty garage for the keyboard...:-) The
A1000 keyboard is better built; you can have kickstart on disk; it's
smaller and a LOT quieter, [maybe not than the old internal drives!!!]
and uses less power; the 2000 has no composite video out, plus the
RGB quality is a tad worse. Composite video (PAL or NTSC) is an extra-
cost option with the 2000.
Q: Have you ever seen a working Amiga-Live!?
A: Yes, I've seen it taking 32-color images at 16fps, and HAM pictures at
something like half that. [!!] It's all done and working. I don't know
why it's not out. It sure beats Digiview at 8 seconds per image!
Q: What do you use for Amiga development tools?
A: DPaint and Infominder, Aztec C, Andy Finkel's Microemacs.
Q: What's the future of the A1000?
A: They aren't making any right now; they're just shipping from stock. But
they do claim that they intend to continue making them.
Q: Is MetaComCo's stuff all really slow, or what? :-)
A: Yes, it is slow. But don't knock it, it works.
Q: Who is the competition for Amiga right now?
A: The new Macs are so expensive, they're not a threat to the 2000, much less
the 1000. Atari's new stuff "doesn't impress me." [that's all he said.]
Q: What can I do about lack of Amiga ads, and the quality of the ones that
do exist?
A: Write (don't call) Clive Smith in Marketing at Westchester and tell him
they need better ads.
Q: Why are the pixels 10% higher than wide?
A: The hardware came out that way, and it would have been a pain to do it
any other way due to sync-rate-multiple timing constraints.
[that's all folks!]
Timothy Rue (AAi member)